Burnout may jeopardize patient care

Because of a lack of funding for research into burnout and the immediate need for change based on the effect it has on patient care seen in Pangioti et al., the question of how to address physician burnout should be answered with quality improvement programs aimed at making immediate changes in health care settings, Mark Linzer, MD, wrote in a related editorial.

“Resonating with these concepts, I propose that, for the burnout prevention and wellness field, we encourage quality improvement projects of high standards: multiple sites, concurrent control groups, longitudinal design, and blinding when feasible, with assessment of outcomes and costs,” he wrote. “These studies can point us toward what we will evaluate in larger trials and allow a place for the rapidly developing information base to be viewed and thus become part of the developing science of work conditions, burnout reduction, and the anticipated result on quality and safety.”

There are research questions that have yet to be answered on this topic, he added, such as to what extent do factors like workflow redesign, use and upkeep of electronic medical records, and chaotic workplaces affect burnout. Further, regulatory environments may play a role, and it is still not known whether reducing burnout among physicians will also reduce burnout among staff. Future studies should also look at how burnout affects trainees and female physicians, he suggested.

“The link between burnout and adverse patient outcomes is stronger, thanks to the work of Panagioti and colleagues,” Dr. Linzer said. “With close to half of U.S. physicians experiencing symptoms of burnout, more work is needed to understand how to reduce it and what we can expect from doing so.”

Dr. Linzer is from the Hennepin Healthcare Systems in Minneapolis. These comments summarize his editorial regarding the findings of Pangioti et al. He reported support for Wellness Champion training by the American College of Physicians and the Association of Chiefs and Leaders in General Internal Medicine and that he has received support for American Medical Association research projects.

FROM JAMA INTERNAL MEDICINE

Physicians experiencing burnout are twice as likely to be associated with patient safety issues and deliver a lower quality of care from low professionalism and are three times as likely to be rated poorly among patients because of depersonalization of care, according to recent research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

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“The primary conclusion of this review is that physician burnout might jeopardize patient care,” Maria Panagioti, PhD, from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Primary Care Research and the NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and her colleagues wrote in their study. “Physician wellness and quality of patient care are critical [as are] complementary dimensions of health care organization efficiency.”

Dr. Panagioti and her colleagues performed a search of the MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycInfo databases and found 47 eligible studies on the topics of physician burnout and patient care, which altogether included data from a pooled cohort of 42,473 physicians. The physicians were median 38 years old, with 44.7% of studies looking at physicians in residency or early career (up to 5 years post residency) and 55.3% of studies examining experienced physicians. The meta-analysis also evaluated physicians in a hospital setting (63.8%), primary care (13.8%), and across various different health care settings (8.5%).

“Investments in organizational strategies to jointly monitor and improve physician wellness and patient care outcomes are needed,” Dr. Panagioti and her colleagues wrote in the study. “Interventions aimed at improving the culture of health care organizations, as well as interventions focused on individual physicians but supported and funded by health care organizations, are beneficial.”

Researchers noted the study quality was low to moderate. Variation in outcomes across studies, heterogeneity among studies, potential selection bias by excluding gray literature, and the inability to establish causal links from findings because of the cross-sectional nature of the studies analyzed were potential limitations in the study, they reported.

The study was funded by the United Kingdom NIHR School for Primary Care Research and the NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. The authors report no relevant conflicts of interest.